Goldfinger

GREAT MOVIES

Roger Ebert

January 31, 1999   

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-goldfinger-1964

Not every man would like to be James Bond, but every boy would. In one adventure after another, he saves the world, defeats bizarre villains, gets to play with neat gadgets and seduces, or is seduced by, stupendously sexy women (this last attribute appeals less to boys younger than 12).

He is a hero, but not a bore. Even faced with certain death, he can cheer himself by focusing instead on the possibility that first he might get lucky. He's obsessed with creature comforts, a trial to his superiors, a sophisticate in all material things and able to parachute into enemy territory and be wearing a tuxedo five minutes later. When it comes to movie spies, Agent 007 is full-service, one-stop shopping.

James Bond is the most durable of this century's movie heroes, and the one most likely to last well into the next--although Sherlock Holmes of course is also immortal, and Tarzan is probably good for a retread. (The "Star Wars" (1977) and "Star Trek" movies are disqualified because they do not have a single hero or a continuous time frame.)

One reason for Bond's longevity among series heroes is quality control; while almost all the Bond films have the same producing team, Tarzan has been the hero of films of wildly divergent quality. And while Holmes has inspired more revisionist interpretations than Hamlet, Bond is consistently Bond: He remains recognizably the same man he was in 1962, when "Dr. No" first brought Ian Fleming's spy to the screen. Even the crypto-Bonds, like the oddball David Niven hero of the maverick "Casino Royale" (1967), or the spoof Bonds, like Our Man Flint and Matt Helm, follow the general outlines of the Fleming legend. He is an archetype so persuasive that to change him would be sacrilegious.

Of all the Bonds, "Goldfinger" (1964) is the best, and can stand as a surrogate for the others. If it is not a great film, it is a great entertainment, and contains all the elements of the Bond formula that would work again and again. It's also interesting as the link between the more modest first two Bonds and the later big-budget extravaganzas; after this one, producers Albert "Cubby" Broccoli and Harry Saltzman could be certain that 007 was good for the long run.

At 111 minutes, "Goldfinger" ties with "Dr. No" as the shortest of the James Bond films, and yet it probably contains more durable images than any other title in the series: the young woman killed by being coated with gold paint; the steel-rimmed bowler of the mute Korean assassin Odd Job (Harold Sakata); the Aston-Martin tricked out with deadly gimmicks and an ejector seat; Bond's sexy karate match with Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman); the villain Goldfinger with his gold-plated Rolls-Royce, and of course the laser beam pointed at that portion of Bond's lower anatomy that he most required if he were to continue as hero of the series.

The Broccoli-Saltzman formula found its lasting form in the making of "Goldfinger." The outline was emerging in the first two films, and here it is complete. First, the title sequence, establishing Bond as a sex hound while linking him with a stunt sequence or a spectacular death. Then the summons by M, head of British Secret Service, and the briefing on a villain obsessed by global domination. The flirtation with Moneypenny. The demonstration by Q of new gimmicks invented especially for his next case. Then the introduction of the villain, his murderous and bizarre sidekick, and his female assistant/accomplice/mistress. Bond's discovery of the nature of the villain's evil scheme. Bond's capture and the certainty of death. Bond's seduction of the villain's woman. And so on, leading always to a final scene in which Bond is about to enjoy his victory reward: the sensuous fruits of his latest conquest.

"About to enjoy." An essential phrase. There are no extended sex scenes in the Bond pictures, only preludes and epilogues. "Bond sex is a special movie style," observes the critic Steve Rhodes. "It consists of a quick but intense kiss followed by a cutaway to later. The sex is hinted at with cute puns and sexual innuendo, but never discussed explicitly." Starting with the Venus-like appearance of Ursula Andress from the sea in "Dr. No," all of the Bond movies have featured beautiful women, but in a publicity tradition, they appear nude not in the movies, but in an issue of Playboy that hits the stands right before the premiere.

"Goldfinger" contains a classic example of the Talking Killer Syndrome, one of the entries in my Little Movie Glossary. Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) has captured Bond and has him under his complete control. Indeed, all he has to do is remain silent and the laser will slice Bond from stem to sternum. But Bond dissuades him with some quick thinking, and is released to become Goldfinger's prisoner.

Goldfinger, like many another Bond villain, seems to have the makings of a frustrated host: It must be galling to have the most elaborate secret hideaways on earth, and no way to show off. So Goldfinger flies Bond to his horse farm in Kentucky, where Bond is able to eavesdrop on the outlines of a Chinese-Goldfinger scheme to assault Fort Knox--making the gold baron Goldfinger the most powerful man in the world, while the Commies benefit from world chaos. Later, in a pleasant chat, Goldfinger foolishly answers all of Bond's remaining questions, such as, how he could possibly remove those tons of gold?

 This stretch of the film is founded on a fundamental absurdity. Goldfinger has assembled the heads of all the Mafia families of America at his Kentucky farm. He pushes buttons, and the most elaborate presentation in movie history unfolds. Screens descend from the ceiling. Film of Fort Knox is shown. The floor itself rolls back, and a vast scale model of the fort rises on hydraulic lifters (with Bond hidden inside). Goldfinger tells the mobsters what he plans to do, Bond listens in, and then shutters fall to lock the Mafioso in the room, and they are immediately killed with poison gas. My question: Why bother to show them that expensive presentation if you're only going to kill them afterward? My best guess: Goldfinger had workmen crawling all over the place for weeks, constructing that presentation, and he wanted to show it to somebody.

Bond is played in these early films, of course, by Sean Connery, who took the bloom off the role for all of his successors (George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan) while simultaneously sidetracking his own film career. For several years no one could think of Connery as anyone but Bond, and he left the series after "You Only Live Twice," in 1967, returning for "Diamonds Are Forever" after the Lazenby fiasco, and a last time in "Never Say Never Again" (because he owned the rights to that property). The other Bonds were not wrong in the role (even Lazenby has his defenders), but they were not Connery, and that was their cross to bear.

Connery had the sleek self-assurance needed for the role, and a gift with deadpan double entendres. But he had something else that none of the others, save perhaps Dalton, could muster: Steely toughness. When his eyes narrowed and his body tensed up, you knew the playing was over and the bloodshed was about to begin.

Fleming's James Bond novels took off in the states only after it became known that they were President Kennedy's favorite recreational reading. Indeed, the more we learn about JFK, the more we see how he resembled Bond, or vice versa.

At a time when "Swinging London" was overtaking pop culture, the Bond series was perfectly positioned (although Bond makes a rare lapse of taste in "Goldfinger" when he recommends listening to the new Beatles with earmuffs on). But Swinging London has swung, and Bond stays on. He has reinvented himself now for 37 years, through all the changes in geopolitics and lifestyles, and a new Bond film just went into production: "The World Is Not Enough." If you count "Casino Royale," it is the 21st Bond film, not that 007 will ever really come of age.

Speedy: The Comic Figure of the Average Man

By Phillip Lopate 

(https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3826-speedy-the-comic-figure-of-the-average-man)

In his memoir, An American Comedy (cowritten with Wesley W. Stout), Harold Lloyd asserts that while growing up “I was average and typical of the time and place.” He continues: “Supposing Atlantic City had been holding Average American Boy contests, with beauty waived, I might have been Master America most any year between 1893 and 1910.” This insistence was not random; it suited someone who doggedly set out to create a type on-screen as close as he could make it to an average specimen—a mirror image of the American audience. The fact that the man who said this was anything but average, a brilliantly gifted physical performer with a genius for constructing comic gags, who moreover understood the film medium with greater sophistication than all but a handful of his peers, speaks to both his modesty and his vanity. It also approaches the mystery of why audiences today may find it harder to connect with Harold Lloyd than they do with, say, Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. He embodied the spirit of the American dream that any average individual with gumption could attain success, an ideal that still seemed within reach in the twenties, before the Depression, Vietnam, and national disenchantment.

Chaplin flirted perennially with pathos, Keaton with melancholy, while Lloyd went his merry way, positive thinking and triumphant. “It’s the optimism,” wrote his defender Richard Griffith, “which chiefly sticks in the highbrow craw and accounts for the continued fundamental lack of interest in him and the continued rating of him below Chaplin, Keaton, and even [Harry] Langdon. Weltschmerz is hard to find in him . . .” And not just world-sorrow, but alienation of any sort. David Thomson gets it right, as usual: “Early clowns are all outsiders, men incapable of, or uninterested in, society’s scale of merit. Chaplin admits the scale but criticizes it. Langdon never notices it. Keaton is bewildered by it, the Marx Brothers know it is a lie, Laurel and Hardy believe it will never come their way. But Lloyd became the least deviant of comedians, a man who never dreamed of being out of the ordinary.” Still, this judgment needs to be complicated, because only a profoundly and uniquely imaginative artist—by definition, an outsider—can take on his shoulders the burden of synthesizing the entire society around him and fashioning an archetype from it that will play in Peoria. A lack of deviancy, moreover, does not account for the sheer inventiveness and pleasure that can still be found in abundance in Lloyd’s films, particularly his four best features, Grandma’s Boy (1922), Safety Last! (1923), The Freshman (1925), and Speedy (1928).

As good a place to start as any is Speedy. The title alone tips off Lloyd’s comic approach, which is to keep up a pace so rapid that no lingering sentimentality or sadness can attach. Fittingly, the film is set in New York City, where, the opening titles tell us, everyone is in such a rush. Whether or not the expression “a New York minute” was yet current, the idea that the city represented the forefront of hectic modernity already held sway. We see establishing shots of trains, tugboats, crowds all hurtling by. Eventually, we are brought to a slower neighborhood, where the most gradual and archaic of conveyances is introduced: a horse-drawn streetcar, driven by Pop Dillon (Bert Woodruff), the grandfather of Lloyd’s love interest, Jane (played winningly by Ann Christy).

At a very basic level, the film is about modes of transport, and its rhythm is largely dictated by many shots of people rushing via taxi, subway, streetcar, and motorcycle. It is also about an older way of being, a more traditionally communal, unhurried morality, in conflict with the new, headlong corporate capitalism that sprang up in the Gilded Age with the railroad barons and now seemed well-nigh unstoppable. The plot hinges, in fact, on a villainous railroad company that seeks to drive the old horsecar line out of business and take over its tracks.

The protagonist, also named Harold, and nicknamed Speedy, would appear to be in harmony with this burgeoning capitalist ethos: he is ambitious and in a hurry to succeed, the very prototype of “the aggressive bourgeois ego which George Santayana saw emerge in the industrializing U.S.—the go-getting American with no higher aim than diligent imitation of the rich . . .” (Pankaj Mishra). But because he is in love with Jane, and she with him, he ends up allying with Pop Dillon and his elderly neighbor-friends against the big shots. Lloyd’s character may be a go-getter, but he is also fundamentally decent and in sympathy with the little guys—his coworkers at the soda fountain and the small shopkeepers who come to his aid when the railroad company tries to seize the horsecar. A full-scale donnybrook occurs between the neighborhood geezers and the railroad thugs, and the point of it is that our hero needs all the help he can get from the People. A veteran uses a peg leg to his advantage. A Chinese laundryman applies his hot iron to the seats of the bad guys. (There is also a loyal dog that keeps coming to Speedy’s aid.) A sort of popular-front politics can be read into these scenes, which if nothing else celebrate the enduring values of neighborhood diversity and local community against the impersonal globalizing corporation.

Speedy is an urban variant of the “boy with the glasses” character that Lloyd had been painstakingly refining for years (and that very nickname had been used earlier for The Freshman’s protagonist). Lloyd had stumbled on the idea of giving his character a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles (lensless, since glass would becloud the eyes’ expression). The glasses were meant to signify a nerdy milquetoast type, from whom one would not expect much derring-do, and who would therefore pleasantly surprise the audience when he rose to heroic challenges. Speedy is given a few other characteristics, such as being unable to hold down a job because he is so obsessed with the Yankees (the cameo featuring a game Babe Ruth, who gets bounced around in Speedy’s cab, is a nice little eye-opener). But in general, we are asked to accept that Speedy is simply Youth in its most healthy, energetic, and accident-prone form.

Lloyd divided his movies into “character pictures” and “gag pictures”: The former, like Grandma’s Boy, took longer to set up the plot and had more psychological shadings. Speedy is decidedly a gag picture: the pace alone, with its wealth of sight jokes, dictated that there would not be enough time for much character development. In various sections, such as the long taxi-driving sequence, the gags flow outrageously yet organically into each other. “Lloyd was outstanding even among the master craftsmen at setting up a gag clearly, culminating and getting out of it deftly, and linking it smoothly to the next,” wrote James Agee. One extended sequence, Speedy’s date with Jane at Coney Island, may suffice as example.

It begins in the subway, with much pushing and shoving. In his memoir, Lloyd quips: “The Subway is a comedy all by itself, except to those who have to ride in it.” Again, we are treated to an ethnically and physiognomically diverse batch of New York humanity. Speedy contrives to get seats for his girl and himself by a trick involving a dollar bill on a string, which he dangles before a seated passenger to entice him to stand, then pulls away. A bit shady, unfair, not entirely what you’d expect from the supposedly proper Speedy, but—entrepreneurial, shall we say. At Luna Park, Speedy is the height of fatuous self-content, with his loving girl beside him and a week’s wages in his pocket, and a new white suit that makes him feel dressed for success. It does not take long for the suit to be marred, first by an overfriendly dog whose paws deface his trousers, then by his leaning against a freshly painted fence. Passersby laugh at the black bars on his jacket, and he has no idea why until he turns around and sees the pattern in a fun-house mirror. Next he passes a fish stand, and a crab lands in his pocket, leading to a set of mishaps in which the crab pinches ladies’ behinds and, in one case, steals a nightgown from a handbag. The women slap Speedy, thinking him a deviant masher, and he reacts with astonishment and self-righteousness. The humor here flows from the Lloyd character’s thinking he is an utterly normal, upstanding citizen, while those in his vicinity view him as a pervert. Here I am making the case that Lloyd’s comedy derives precisely from challenging his character’s assumptions of being the quintessence of average and normal.

Lloyd was a veteran of one- and two-reel comedies made for producer Hal Roach (Mack Sennett’s rival). It was a school that taught him to brainstorm ideas with story and gag writers but never to work from finished scripts, instead trusting to improvisation and inspiration on location for building elaborations on a gag onto a comic bit. “Our lack of method is deplorable, but somehow it works,” he testified. While he often directed parts of his pictures, he omitted taking directorial credit, preferring to help out the ex–gag writer designated for that job and perhaps feeling it was sufficient that the public knew the film reflected his own comic vision. Ted Wilde is listed as the director of Speedy, but the whole notion of auteurism seems a little spurious when it comes to silent comedy. By whatever collaborations the film came about, the result hangs together as a fresh, kinetic, fast-moving affair. The Coney Island sequence, for instance, has some beautiful cutaways to the fairway at night, some surreal dream swirls when Speedy and Jane are trying out every punishing ride, and a hysterical fantasy shot of twin babies with Harold-like spectacles riding in the moving van driving the couple home, which they pretend is their future abode.

By the film’s conclusion, Speedy has gotten his girl by saving Pop Dillon’s horsecar business, and all ends happily. In an interview with Lloyd long after he retired (he did not self-destruct, like many other silent film stars, but was a business-shrewd steward of his heritage), he was asked to compare Chaplin’s Tramp to his boy with glasses. “Well, Charlie generally had to play the losing lover because his character was the Little Tramp—who was a little grotesque. If he won the girl, she generally had to be off beat, a little screwy . . . But with this boy-with-the-glasses character—that was one of his virtues: he wore ordinary clothes, the same as the boy next door. He was somebody you’d pass on the street—and therefore his romances were believable. And I would say that I got the girl most every time. Generally, in many of Charlie’s pictures, he walked down the road at the end, which had its own virtue.”

We see in this passage Lloyd’s evenhanded sense of perspective, though his penultimate statement about getting the girl might strike some nowadays as a little smug. Still, as he said, each—Chaplin’s final saddening aloneness and his own cheerful romantic triumph—has its place. And Lloyd had a purer sense than most of what it meant to keep audiences laughing. He was a profound student of the art of comedy, as well as one of its most ebullient practitioners.

Phillip Lopate’s most recent books are Portrait Inside My Head and To Show and to Tell. He directs the nonfiction program at Columbia University.